A call for a US National Academy of Environmental Design is another sign of changing times

First we killed God. Then it was nature, and after that history. Now it’s architecture.

No, we won’t stop building any time soon, but in an era when the overwhelming priorities are climate change and environmental degradation, not to mention recessionary economics; building is less about creating structures than organizing various natural processes.

Little wonder then that the American Institute of Architects and a bevy of other U.S. agencies are calling for the creation of a National Academy of Environmental Design. It’s an idea whose time has come. The basic intention is to bring a more holistic approach to building. Given that the effects of architecture range from health and wellness to water use and green-house gas emissions, a more comprehensive strategy makes sense. After all, what do architects know about the impact of what they do on rates of diabetes and obesity?

Landscape architects have been quicker to grasp this new reality that the built environment remains part of the larger environment.

Architects, however, remain attached to the idea of the building as a stand-alone icon, a monument. Though it’s true much contemporary commercial construction is intended for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, many new buildings could have been designed long before global warming was even a twinkle in the oil industry’s eye.

Though standards have improved hugely, the worst offenders are the condo towers that now seem to pop up weekly in the Greater Toronto Area and beyond. Given the particular economics of the market — build cheap, sell dear, walk away — developers feel little pressure to pursue sustainability. It increases costs.

Though mechanical systems — everything from refrigerators and toilets to heating and cooling machines — are more efficient today, many condos residents are unable to do something as basic as separate compost and recycling from garbage.

Then there’s the issue of the glass facades that will inevitably give out at great expense to owners and environment. Through it all, the allure of living in your own piece of the sky remains irresistible despite environmental concerns.

That’s where the architect comes into the equation; they’re the ones who compose those glass exteriors ever more beguilingly, who make them so hard to resist.

In architecture, what you see is what you get. But if there’s one lesson to be learned from global warming, surely it must be that what matters most is what we don’t see, or think about — not glass walls but things such as clean water, fresh air, light, warmth, energy. . .

In the future, we will look back at these early 21st-century towers much as we do now at suburbia, as so much vertical sprawl. No one would deny that these products of the development industry are as attractive as anything designed by good neo-modernist architects using glass and steel. But that’s no longer enough. Too often, architectural elegance hides inner ecological ugliness.

The message isn’t new. The Manitoba Hydro Place, a collaborative effort led by a Toronto architectural office and a firm of German energy engineers, opened in Winnipeg in 2009. The 21-storey glass structure was conceived as a site-specific response to everything from the local water table and wind patterns to sunlight and proximity to public transit and other amenities.

With its heat-reflecting green roofs, solar chimney — that exhausts both cold and hot air, as needed — and closed-loop geothermal system that both heats and cools, the building is designed to incorporate natural processes. Most buildings try to duplicate these same processes in what amounts to a kind of parallel interior ecology of heating and cooling technology.

To compare Hydro Place with the hermetically sealed towers of the 1970s and ’80s, whose legacy includes Legionnaires’ disease from bacteria-laden cooling systems, is to see a shift of the most profound sort. Those earlier structures were separated from the world carefully, deliberately, systematically. By contrast, Hydro Place has as many points of connection as possible. Its very massing and positioning reflect a desire to take advantage of every opportunity possible.

This sort of thinking is still not pervasive, or even wide-spread. If new office towers are sustainable, it’s because landlords understand the logic of environmentalism and stand to gain from the efficiencies it offers. Whatever the extra upfront cost of green technology may be — between 2.5 and 5 percent — it can be recovered in a relatively short time.

None of this spells the end of architecture, but it does point to new levels of collaboration involving disciplines not typically included in the process. Future builders might put a greater priority on hiring the best energy engineers, and only then worry about who the architect will be.

If this is inevitable it’s because buildings are increasingly viewed not as discreet elements on the landscape, but as integral parts of the landscape. With help from architects, we also managed to forget that we, too, form part of the world we inhabit. Now with help from them — and other professions — we must learn how to move back into that world.

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